Sales surge at TEFAF Maastricht

This week's rarefied bazaar of art and antiquities at TEFAF in Maastricht is truly an international affair that has proven the upper-end of the market remains strong in many categories, from antiquities to contemporary art. 

Early on, a group of Chinese buyers snapped up Japanese art from Malcolm Fairey, a Russian collector purchased a work by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (680,000 euros), and a 2,000-year-old Roman marble cinerary urn was sold by Rupert Wace to Mougins Museum of Classical Art in France for a price in the region of 1 million euros.

Old Masters, encompassing several fresh-to-market examples, have enticed buyers. For one, Jack Kilgore offered a newly-identified Rubens portrait of the Roman Emperor Commodus which sold for $1.25 million.

Modern masters have delivered equally exceptional results with notable sales of a Joan Miro sculpture for $5 million (Landau Fine Art) and Wassily Kandinsky's "Study for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse II," a small-scale work of 1914, which went from Galerie Thomas to a European collector for just under €1 million ($1.5 million), according to Bloomberg.

Several French paintings from Waterhouse & Dodd found new homes, including Albert Gleizes's "Juliette a la Toque" from 1921, which sold for €250,000 ($370,000).

Van de Weghe Gallery parted with an untitled 1981 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting to a French collector for $2.5 million.

The fair continues through March 27. Read more about TEFAF sales here.